Tonkatsu places are a dime a dozen in Taiwan, and most of them are decent without being exceptional. For me, having lived in Japan and sampled some of the best katsu the world has to offer, it’s particularly difficult to find one that can satisfy my desires. And so I just had to visit Anzu read more

I have a new favourite fried chicken joint. ‘Two Peck’ Fried Chicken in Taiwan is possibly the most sensational fried chicken I have ever tasted. The franchises have branched out like wildfire since the first store opened in 2005, and there’s good reason. The shop fronts are tiny, but the fried chicken breasts are massive. read more

Yann Martel’s Man Booker-winning Life of Pi is one of my favourite novels of all-time, and so I was both excited and apprehensive when I heard that it was finally released as a movie more than 10 years after it was originally published. One of the reasons why the film took so long to adapt from read more

One of the best books I read this year, and certainly the most fascinating, is the book everyone has been reading — Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (apparently the only authorised biography of the Apple co-founder). I was entranced by this mammoth book (surprising considering I’m neither an Apple fanatic or hater) and ploughed through it read more

You are browsing the Blog for Carol Dweck.

I’m generally pretty sceptical when it comes to self-help books because, let’s face it, they all seem life-changingly great when you’re reading them but in reality do absolutely nothing for you after you turn the last page. Oh sure, there might be some vague recommendations you might remember — or even try to put into action — for a few days or weeks, but in the long run you’ll eventually forget about it and gravitate back towards what things were like before.

So naturally, when my sister told me about Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, I went and got myself a copy right away. She hadn’t even read it, but said it was the “it” thing in her part of the world right now, even though the book was published originally in 2006. I guess it sometimes takes a bit of time for these books to take off.

I finished the book a few weeks ago and I am still pretty excited about it. The ideas in this book are unlikely to make you rich and successful, but I genuinely believe it is one of a few self-help books out there that can actually help a lot of people make positive changes in their lives.

You’ll have to read it to get the whole shebang, but the basic concept underlying the book is that people’s lives are dictated by two types of mindsets — the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

People with the fixed mindset essentially believe we are born a certain way and that’s that. We are each given a certain amount of intelligence and talent and natural endowments, and some people are just naturally more gifted than others. Most of these people would probably accept that they could improve at something if they keep working at it, but at the end of the day their abilities are fixed/ limited and it’s not worth the effort to find out.

For fixed mindset people, life is all about proving themselves to others. They are afraid to make mistakes because they are don’t want to be labelled stupid or incompetent, tags they think will permanently define who they are. They tend to take the easy route and avoid risks so they can look good in front of other people. They ascribe to the idea that if people do better than them it is because they are smarter or more gifted, and not because those people worked harder than they did.

For people with growth mindsets, on the other hand, life is all about taking on challenges with a positive attitude, learning from mistakes and growing and improving all the time. At the core of this mindset is the belief that people’s real potentials are unknown. It does not mean that everyone is created equal or that people can be exactly what they set out to be as long as they put their mind to it, just that we should not be afraid to fail and should approach problems and setbacks as challenges to overcome as opposed to seeing them as a reflection of who we are.

One of the earliest examples in the book Dweck uses is children who are given puzzles to solve. Everyone starts off with a simple puzzle they can solve easily, but they are then given a much harder puzzle beyond most of their abilities. The children with fixed mindsets lost interest and give up quickly or want to go back to solving easier puzzles, while the children with growth mindsets get excited by the challenge and keep working — and failing — at the puzzle until they can conquer it.

To demonstrate the mindsets in a real life adult context, Dweck uses the following example (reconstructed from memory). On a particular day, you receive a disappointing mark on an exam, after which you discover that you got a parking ticket. You then call your dear friend to vent, but the friend seems totally uninterested in your problems. How would you react or feel in these circumstances? Fixed mindset people would tend to just think, man, I’m having a crap day, nothing is going right for me. But growth mindset people will tend to think about how they can do better in the exam next time, how they can avoid parking tickets in the future, and whether there is a reason why their friend seems to not care.

In the book, Dweck does tend to lump people into these two categories — fixed or growth — but in reality people are much more dynamic than that, and she does recognise that each person will likely possess a mixture of mindsets on different things so that they can have a fixed mindset when it comes to one thing but a growth mindset when it comes to another. For instance, I think if I keep working at my writing I could one day become an excellent author or screenwriter, but I doubt all the basketball practice in the world could land me in the NBA (or any professional league for that matter).

The first couple of chapters of Mindset go through these fundamental concepts in some detail, and after that Dweck ventures into specific areas, from sporting success to the business world and human relationships. And according to her, pretty much everything you achieve or don’t achieve in life can be boiled down to your mindset.

It helps that the book is written in a very reader-friendly way that can easily be comprehended by younger readers and non-native English speakers alike. It does occasionally get somewhat preachy in tone, which can be off-putting when you are constantly being bombarded with example after example (a few times I was like, “I get it already!”), but then again, maybe some people need that kind of repeated reinforcement before the idea really gets through.

Dweck tries to keep interesting by using lots and lots of real life examples to demonstrate her point, many of which involve celebrities and famous people, as well as some personal examples extracted from life (both positive and negative).

Occasionally the examples are oversimplified, which even she readily admits for the sake of getting her point across. Tennis legend John McEnroe, for instance, is her whipping boy in the sports chapter. With his petulant attitude and tendency to blame everyone else for his failures, McEnroe is the epitome of everything she despises (about the fixed mindset, that is) and is used numerous times to demonstrate why the fixed mindset limits success. But damn, isn’t McEnroe also one of the most successful tennis players of all time? Surely he didn’t get there on talent alone, and maybe it was his fear of failure — a fixed mindset trait — that drove him to his greatness?

I have a fixed mindset? You’ve got to be kidding me!

By contrast, Dweck gushes over basketball great Michael Jordan, who is praised for his hard work, dedication, humility and respect for teammates — all growth mindset traits. But anyone who follows basketball should know that MJ was no saint and is/was one of the most arrogant, egotistical people around, someone who regularly belittled, tormented and bullied teammates in his heyday. Perhaps his growth mindset should only be applied to honing his own basketball skills? And don’t even get me started on how Jordan has been managing the Charlotte Bobcats (soon to be Hornets again)!

That is not to say Dweck doesn’t employ a lot of insightful examples that do make you think twice about the ways we approach problems in our own lives. The relationship chapter, for instance, shows how mindsets apply to the way people approach relationships and breakups. Are you the kind of person who believes there is a perfect mate out there for you who complements you in every way and will never change, or are you the kind of person who thinks relationships are hard work and effort is imperative for them to grow and blossom?

As a father of two kids under two, the chapter on how to teach children about positive mindsets was particularly interesting to me. Children absorb everything we tell them, and according to Dweck, we should always praise them for their effort as opposed to their intelligence (eg, “You got an A without even studying, you’re so smart!”). This is because children should learn that success comes from hard work, not from their natural gifts. The same thing goes for failure. Do we sugar-coat it with white lies or do we tell them the truth — that if they really want something they need to work harder? That’s the difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

In some ways Mindset reinforces the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers that successful people — the most successful — are a combination of talent and hard work. But Dweck goes even than that further to suggest that many of the most successful people in the world don’t even have the “talent” they are known for, or at least they didn’t have it at the start or until well into their careers (thereby suggesting that some talents are fictions).

The reason I think the book could work for a lot of people is because the ideas put forth in it are at the most basic, fundamental level — that everything comes from your mindset. For example, it doesn’t just tell you to think positive and learn from mistakes; positive thinking is a product of a growth mindset.

That said, this is not to say that Mindset offers a magic switch to success. As Dweck notes in her final chapter, holding onto a growth mindset is a constant challenge full of potential setbacks. It is about reminding yourself that whenever things go wrong you need to adhere to the growth mindset, which she admits is difficult (even for her), but if you persist your mindset can eventually change for the better.

As such, you probably need a growth mindset to be able to fully appreciate the book. If you go into it with a fixed mindset you might think there is no point because the book can’t really change the way you think or the way you live your life. But if you think there is potential for growth and improvement then the book could very well help you accomplish that.

4/5

PS: As for me, I’m trying my best to implement the growth mindset into every aspect of my daily life. So far so good, but maybe check back in a couple of years to see if it’s made any difference.